Harriet Devine's Blog

My holiday reading no.4: Little Face

Sophie Hannah's Little Face was one of those books that I read about on someone's blog (sorry, can't remember whose) and knew I must read. It was only after it arrived that I discovered that Sophie Hannah was the daughter of that wonderfully experienced and talented writer Adele Geras -- I've read and blogged about several of her books, though not yet read all 90 of them! Sophie is looking likely to be as prolific as her mother -- though she is a successful poet, she seems to be onto a winner with fiction and I am really looking forward to her second novel, Hurting Distance. You can read all about her on her website. Meanwhile, Little Face. This is the story of Alice  Fancourt. When the novel begins, she has just given birth to a baby daughter, Florence, and after two weeks has gone out for the first time, leaving the baby at home with her husband David. When she gets back, she goes straight to the nursery, from where David hears a terrible scream -- and Alice begins to insist that the baby is not Florence, that someone has come to the house in her absence and substituted another baby girl. David refuses to believe her and claims that she has gone mad. The police get involved, and Simon, the young detective inspector who is assigned the case, drawn to Alice, struggles with his need to believe her despite the absolute lack of proof. A DNA test is suggested but in the meantime David becomes more and more sadistic and threatening towards Alice.
More I cannot say, but the novel ends with a satisfyingly surprising twist.
Sophie Hannah has constructed this story with great skill. It is told in alternate chapters by two voices, Alice's and Simon's, and we often get accounts of the same event from both of them. But both of them conceal facts, not only from each other, but also from the reader, so we are never sure of the real truth of what has occurred until right at the end. Of course this is what gets called a psychological thriller, and indeed the psychology of both Alice and Simon is precisely what is fascinating here. Go for it!

My holiday reading no.3: The Judgement of Strangers

This  was another last minute charity-shop find.  I'd read  one of  Andrew Taylor's 'Lydmouth' novels, An Air That Kills, a while back, and quite liked it. This one sounded intriguing so I thought I'd give it a go, and I'm very glad I did -- thought it was extremely interesting and thought-provoking. Taylor seems to go in for series, as this is the middle novel of a trilogy, the 'Roth Trilogy' to be exact. The three novels are free-standing, as it were, but they deal with members of two families, spread over several decades, and all three have a connection to the Church of England. In this one, the central character is a clergyman, David Byfield. A widower in his forties with an eighteen-year-old daughter, he is struggling with the celibacy enforced by his position in the church, and soon after the beginning of the novel he remarries, though his new wife, the beautiful Vanessa, turns out to have problems of her own. Then a series of sinister events start to happen in the village, and gradually  a number of dark and frightening revelations begin to undermine everything that appears so calm and normal on the surface of everyone's lives.
This is far from a standard murder mystery. In fact no murders take place until a very long way into the novel. It is, I suppose, a psychological thriller of sorts, but even that does not really do it justice. What stayed with me most powerfully was the characterisation of David Byfield himself. Intelligent, flawed, troubled, wrestling with his sexuality and his religious beliefs, unable to communicate with his difficult daughter, overwhelmed by a sudden, unexpected and illicit passion, he remains a good man trying to do right under impossible circumstances. Hard to do this novel justice without revealing too much, but I really recommend it. I've already started another volume of the trilogy so watch this space.
 

My holiday reading no.2: Gone for Good

Every year (twice a year in fact) I help out at the bookstall of our local school fair. This has several advantages -- you get to talk to people about books and advise them about what they might enjoy -- you get first go at the books before the punters arrive -- and at the end, you can take any of the unsold books you fancy home with you. This year, this one came in the last category. I had never heard of Harlan Coben though apparently he is very celebrated, and his latest book Tell No One has been made into a film in France. This one, Gone for Good, I liked a lot. At the beginning of the book, the main protagonist, Will Klein, learns from his dying mother that his brother Ken, missing and presumed dead after he became the main suspect for a brutal murder eleven years earlier, is still alive. While he is still attempting to deal with this information, Will is devastated by the disappearance of his beautiful girlfriend and by the fact that she now turns out to be the prime suspect in a double murder. As Will starts to investigate these two apparently unrelated revelations, he uncovers more and more secrets and gets himself into increasingly frightening and threatening situations. Nothing, it appears, is what it seems and even identities start to shift.... There are some satisfyingly menacing characters in the novel, not least The Ghost, a terrifyingly suave sociopath, and the ending has a number of breathtaking twists right up to the final page. Light reading, perhaps, but of a high calibre.

My holiday reading no.1: Mrs Sartoris

Just back from India where I had a very restful time -- stayed the whole time in a tiny village by the sea in beautiful Kerala, and had two weeks of ayurvedic panchakarma treatment -- basically an hour every day of gloriously relaxing oil massage -- said to be rejuvenating and I certainly feel better for it. Also managed to read some books, including this one which I picked up in a charity shop just before I left London. I'd never heard of it before but it looked appealing and I'm so glad I bought it as I absolutely loved it. Translated (extremely well) from German, it is deceptively (as an estate agent might say) short, but packs a tremendous amount in to its rather few pages. The story is narrated by Mrs Sartoris herself, an apparently conventional bourgeois housewife. Interspersed with her account of her life are short passages describing a horrific hit and run accident, though the identities of the victim and the driver are not clear, and nor is the relevance of this apparent tangent to the main narrative. As the story progresses, we learn of Mrs S's unhappy past -- a breakdown following a broken engagement, the decision to marry her dull husband out of a sort of desperation, her difficult relationship with her teenage daughter -- and of the intense, passionate love affair that transforms her life. Feeding these facts into the recurring flashes of detail about the hit and run accident, the reader starts to make guesses about what must have happened. I certainly got it wrong! But was absolutely convinced by the rightness of all that occurred, and by the very believable, unhappy woman at the centre of this fine novel.